and I seriously thought Joey was my second cousin until maybe a year or so ago. Cole is from Joey’s neighborhood, and the two of them have been best friends for as long as any of us can remember. Over the years, whenever Mom and I visited or they came down to Flemington to hang out, we would jam. So when Joey and I ended up at Rutgers together, Cole moved to New Brunswick and got a job washing pots at Old Man Rafferty’s so we could start a real band.
We started up freshman year, and right away we pulled our sound together and wrote a ton of cool songs and started playing parties left and right as a three-piece. We wanted another guitarist to fill the sound out, and when Travis joined it was exactly what we were all hoping it would be. Not just because it sounded better (and wow, adding Travis’s Les Paul was a dose of magic for us), but because we all got along really well, and that’s even harder to find. It’s seriously like four people in one marriage, it’s so much like a family sometimes. There’s tons of quirk and eccentricity and hang-ups that have to be negotiated when you’re working so closely like that with other people. But we luck out because we all share the same sense of humor, the same taste in fast food, the same zealous thirst for rock, and it works. We work.
But something else happens when you spend all this time with the same three guys working on music. Something important.
For example, when Cole’s last girlfriend dumped him, Joey, Travis, and I sat up all night and watched infomercials with him and we wouldn’t let him be by himself for a week until we were fairly certain he could feed and dress himself without incident. When Joey’s dad announced he was leaving his mother for his twenty-three-year-old secretary last summer, we all went over to see him at Mama Santi’s in Lodi and got drunk on red wine and ate homemade ravioli and meatballs and cannolis and listened to her cry and curse him out all night. Joey even wrote a song about it that we still have in the set today, “Carmen Alfredo.” When Travis’s dad had a major scare last year with his heart and Travis didn’t have enough money to fly home, we gave him everything we had in the band till to get him on a plane. I called him in Omaha every day, too. Actually, I call him every day anyway. There’s always some band business that needs to get dealt with, and if the band is a family, Travis and I are basically the parents.
When my last boyfriend, Josh the Michael Bolton fan (I know, I know), broke up with me my freshman year and I went all fetal position in my dorm room, those guys saved me, they really did. The first night when I was such a mess, they all slept on the floor of my dorm room. Two nights later when I hadn’t eaten anything but three bowls of Cheerios in two days, Joey called my mom and she came and surprised me with an entire spaghetti meal, including garlic knots and salad and meatballs that we all sat and ate right in my dorm room, picnic-style. And through all of that, Travis never left my side.
After going through the assorted travails one goes through in their later formative years with a support system like these guys, it’s damned painful to even imagine life without them around. In fact, I can’t bring myself to even try. And that bond that we’ve got going on is a part of our sound, too. You can hear it when we play. We play like we’ve been playing for ten years already and we know it. We’re good. If we just keep it together and keep working, we’re going to make it, and that’s what we all want more than anything.
And that’s why I can’t keep fucking Travis, even though part of me definitely, absolutely, and positively still wants to. I can’t deny that. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it. But I can’t risk it.
We’ve got everything to lose.
Chapter Two
I’m in my old bedroom at Mom’s house in Flemington, the little blue cape where I grew up, where she and Granny live. The walls of my room are still that dawn-pink color I had to have when I was eight